{"id":44,"date":"2006-10-31T13:17:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-31T18:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/?p=44"},"modified":"2006-10-31T13:17:00","modified_gmt":"2006-10-31T18:17:00","slug":"silence-is-deadly-for-projects-and-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/2006\/10\/silence-is-deadly-for-projects-and-teams\/","title":{"rendered":"Silence is deadly (for projects and teams)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve been around projects long enough you know the drill&#8230; There are real problems being encountered but everyone above you seems to either be unaware or uninterested in grappling with them.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px\" alt=\"Lipstick on a Pig, How Illusion Leads to Crisis in Real World Projects\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.i-leadonline.com\/images\/CantSpeakTruth.jpg?w=736\" border=\"0\" \/>Denial is a powerful defense mechanism but rarely an effective project management strategy.<br \/>Eventually there&#8217;s a project crisis. Rinse and repeat.<\/p>\n<p>Since we regularly help organizations deal with issues related to these, I was pleased to read some recent results from research performed by VitalSmarts and The Concours Group. They surveyed more than 1,000 executives and project management professionals across 40 companies in a wide variety of industries.<\/p>\n<p>Their <em><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.silencefails.com\/solutions.html?utm_content=body\" target=\"_blank\">Silence Fails<\/a><\/strong><\/em> study found direct correlations between our willingness and ability to speak up about issues and how successfully we deliver projects. The five most lethal issues that don&#8217;t get discussed are:<iframe style=\"WIDTH: 120px; HEIGHT: 240px\" align=\"right\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/rcm.amazon.com\/e\/cm?t=instituteforl-20&#038;o=1&amp;p=8&#038;l=as1&amp;asins=0071401946&#038;fc1=000000&amp;IS2=1&#038;lt1=_blank&amp;amp;amp;lc1=0000FF&#038;bc1=000000&amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;f=ifr\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe> <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Fact-free planning<\/strong>. Failure is nearly predestined through insufficient acceptance of reality when it comes to timeframes and resources. The problem isn&#8217;t that the limitations exist. The problem is people won&#8217;t discuss the reality.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Absent without leave (AWOL) sponsors<\/strong>. What happens when the sponsor doesn&#8217;t lead? Can we talk about that? If not, prepare for failure.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Skirting<\/strong>. When people skirt around the predefined process, we&#8217;re often left with the resulting scope creep. If we can&#8217;t discuss how this impacts projects, we&#8217;ll likely soon be discussing why the project failed.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Project chicken<\/strong>. We know we&#8217;re late but we also know another team is late so we don&#8217;t speak up. It&#8217;s a deadly game that happens way too often. And the result? It&#8217;s not pretty.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Team failures<\/strong>. Just because we put people on a team together doesn&#8217;t make them a team. Do we perpetuate the dysfunction by pretending everything&#8217;s fine or do we intentionally work to improve the team dynamics. The answer can significantly impact a project&#8217;s success.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Does your team or organization struggle with these issues? <a href=\"http:\/\/www.i-leadonline.com\/contactus.asp\">Contact us today<\/a> about our <a href=\"http:\/\/www.i-leadonline.com\/lipstick-on-a-pig-keynote.asp\">Lipstick on a Pig: How Illusion Leads to Crisis in Real World Projects<\/a> keynote. It&#8217;s perfect for a company meeting, offsite, or retreat. <\/p>\n<p>We discuss these dynamics in more detail, including practical ideas about how to break out of the rut of failure caused by illusion. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.i-leadonline.com\/contactus.asp\">Contact us today<\/a> for more information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve been around projects long enough you know the drill&#8230; There are real problems being encountered but everyone above you seems to either be unaware or uninterested in grappling with them. Denial is a powerful defense mechanism but rarely an effective project management strategy.Eventually there&#8217;s a project crisis. Rinse and repeat. Since we regularly&#8230; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/2006\/10\/silence-is-deadly-for-projects-and-teams\/#more-44\">Continue Reading &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21,32,8,30,23,33,26,4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p488Wj-I","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}